The village burned behind them.
Ash rained like snow as Arjuna and Tellen crossed the ravine trail at dawn. Neither spoke. The forest was quiet, unnaturally so, as if the land itself was holding its breath.
Arjuna looked back once—just once.
The Hollow Lights still flickered through the smoke. Not lanterns anymore, but restless souls, unbound by the pact. Their dance was slower now. Grieving. Starved.
"They'll rebuild," Tellen said at last. "They always do. Or they'll forget, like the rest."
Arjuna didn't answer.
He could still feel the child's eyes on him—the Hollowborn's words echoing in the ruins of his mind:
"I remember what you forgot."
They camped by the Weeping Stones. A ring of ancient standing rocks that oozed slow tears of water in spring, now half-frozen in the autumn's breath. Tellen scribbled furiously in his journal while Arjuna tried to sleep.
But the dreams returned.
Not like before.
Not glimpses.
Not fragments.
A full memory, threaded back into him.
He saw her.Nyssara.
Not as the Witch Queen or the veiled terror of Tellen's stories.
But as her.
Rain falling on shattered obsidian. Her bare feet cut from dancing over broken gods. Arjuna knelt before her, sword buried in the corpse of a sun priest. Blood steaming on holy ground.
"I killed him for you," he'd said.
Nyssara had smiled then, just once.
And kissed him in the dark.
He woke gasping. Tellen looked up, concerned. "Another one?"
"I remember her," Arjuna said.
"Who?"
He hesitated.
"…someone I failed."
They reached the forest's edge by midday. There, the road forked—one way east, toward the trade routes and cities still clinging to civilization. The other: west, into the Redwaste.
Tellen pointed west. "That way. Toward the Broken Crown."
Arjuna said nothing. Just walked.
Behind them, the Hollow Lights finally faded.
And in the clearing near the Binding Tree, the Eldest's bones lay scattered across scorched earth, her last breath scrawled into dirt with one trembling finger:
The Vow stirs. The Hollow King walks.
Far away, atop the Spire of Sorrow, Elriand stood before a council of masked priests. His pale eyes were rimmed with gold, and time-worn magic pulsed behind his voice.
"Arjuna remembers."
The high priest flinched. "But not all."
Elriand turned, the wind clawing at his cloak. "No. But enough to be dangerous."
He stepped into the storm.
"I'll remind him of the rest. Even if it breaks him."
Elsewhere, beneath the Demon Coast, a sealed temple groaned in its chains. Beneath runes older than time, a statue of Nyssara wept blood for the first time in centuries.
A whisper echoed in the drowned halls.
He comes.
The Broken Knight with the burning name.